‘We will remember’ the Anzacs, we say, but who are they?
Every Anzac Day there’s a dawn chorus up and down the land of people saying, ‘‘We will remember them.’’ But who are they, this ‘‘them’’?
Some of us will remember relatives who served, or died, in uniform.
But what of all those other names appearing on the nation’s many memorials, plaques and cenotaphs?
It was a question Judith Burkin pondered one chilly morning after the crowds had departed the memorial at the small Hawke’s Bay settlement of Maraekakaho.
Gazing at the 117 names of those who’d been to the Great War, Burkin wondered who they were and whether they might be remembered as individuals rather than simply ‘‘them’’.
That was back in 2017. Burkin and her husband, Jonathan Stockley, had migrated to Hawke’s Bay from England seven years earlier and knew next to nothing about the Anzacs, she said.
‘‘We’d just been saying, ‘We will remember them,’ and I thought well, how can you remember? You can remember the generality of soldiers going to war, and we all know what happened and how awful it all was, but we don’t remember them as people. They’re just names on a memorial.’’
Burkin’s first inclination was to see just what one might be able to discover. ‘‘It turns out there is just this treasure trove of information and records on various websites,’’ she said.
‘‘It was fascinating. Once I started I was away. I thought, ‘I’m going to have to write this down, because there’s no point just me knowing it.’ ’’
Some four years and countless hours at her computer later, Burkin has compiled stories of 108 of the 117 people. The other nine remain elusive.
It wasn’t always easy. ‘‘Some names were misspelled; some had no initials, or the wrong initials; some had the middle name instead of the surname. There were also a couple who weren’t mentioned but should have been.’’
She has used all manner of records to trace what these people were doing before, during and after the war.
Seventeen of those 117 were killed. Many of those who went to war had moved to the district from elsewhere, usually to work on the huge sheep farm that dominated the district.
Some returned to the district and raised families; some never came back.
Others returned with missing limbs or injuries that plagued them for the rest of their lives. Some won medals for gallantry. Some were mentioned in dispatches. Most weren’t.
There was at least one set of three brothers who went away. Several parents lost two sons. The only women were two sisters who went as nurses.
There are still descendants of some of these people living nearby.
One of those, Jeff Clarkson, the son of Edward Neville Coleman Clarkson, was able to meet Burkin a few years ago shortly before he died.
‘‘He was 77 then. He told me how when his mother was dying and he and his dad were at her bedside, his dad spoke about the war for the first time,’’ she said.
‘‘It was always fascinating doing the research, but sometimes it was hard. It’s quite draining when you’re talking about war all the time,’’ Burkin said.
‘‘I’m not an expert on the war, or battalions, or the army . . . For me it’s all about the people.’’
Burkin has written a ‘‘minibiography’’ of three to four pages on each person. In about a quarter of the cases she was able to locate photographs. The end result is a large collection of stories.
‘‘They’re all on my computer, all backed up. I have occasionally printed them out for people who are related. I’ve thought about producing a book, but I’m not sure many would read it. I think the best thing may be a website. Then it can be updated.’’
A few years ago Burkin produced posters of several of the veterans and had them hung in the local church. Each had a short biography.
‘‘I wanted people to be able to look into the faces of these men who went off to war,’’ she said.
Burkin and Stockley will be back among the crowd of about 150 gathered at the memorial this Anzac Day, remembering a bit of the story of each of those 108 names.
In time she may research the backgrounds to the names of the 10 local men who fell in World War II.